I have been a Biodynamic farmer for fifty-two years and can still enjoy milking a cow or using my chain saw. However, now I don’t have the stamina to keep up the heavy work and I just don’t get the satisfaction from physical work the way I used to. Instead I have gone deeper into my spiritual relationship with our land.

I still love the land and now have had to transform the way I interact with her. Going in this direction, I have found joy in sharing and teaching Biodynamics to our many volunteers. I am also learning to work with the nature spirits in a more conscious way. This has been very exciting.

I have always been fascinated with the unseen world. Biodynamic farming has helped me with this as it is all about working with the spiritual formative forces of the universe. Part of this is honoring and working with the elemental or nature spirits.

Most of the modern world does not know what nature spirits are, let alone that they are responsible for the life that surrounds us. Luckily there have been communities like Findhorn in Scotland and many individuals who can communicate withe these beings. The message always is the same. When will you humans wake up and start working with us.

For many years this has been a dream of mine. A while back we had a healer friend on our farm and she performed a cleansing ceremony based on the work of Michaela Small Write’s method of coning or mapping. I decided to try to use this method in my own way and it has been very beneficial to the farm. 

We have several problems on the farm that have hindered us from growing everything we would like to have. One has been that we have leaf cutter ants that just loved our temperate climate vegetables. Plants like our cabbages or beetroots would emerge and then one morning they would all be gone. We have huge leaf cutter ant nests out in the fields which I don’t want to destroy. However they had ant highways into our gardens and at night you could see them scurrying up and down with our cabbage leaves. This meant that what we grew was quite limited.

Before going to bed at night I like to visit our House of Original Thought, check the fire, drum and meditate. I decided to try the Mapping method and to talk to the Ant beings.

Our spirit house is very peaceful at night and after drumming for half an hour while I thanked all the spirit beings and filling my heart with gratitude and love I started the ceremony.

I called in my higher self and the beings that I though would be important. I called in the Apu of our sacred mountain. I called in the seven princes of the lagoons, Pan, the Devas of the plants, the being of the White Brotherhood involved with nature, several other beings and finally asked the Cutter Ant being to join us. After drumming for a while, a beautiful shining spiritual being about five inches long appeared. I explained that I really appreciated what all the ants did out in the fields and their work in keeping the world clean and healthy. However I was not planting temperate climate vegetables for her ants to eat. They were perfectly happy before with what nature provided and I said that they were to leave the gardens within twenty-four hours. When I was finished talking and explaining the situation I closed the ceremony by thanking all the beings and releasing them one by one.

A day later when I went out to check, I found lots of little ants busily working away. I thought my ceremony had failed but then I realized that there were no leaf cutter ants to be found. They had all left. As the tiny ants do little harm, I have left them alone.

For me, it is very exciting that we can work with the unseen beings in this way. In every thing I have studied about working with nature it is always mentioned that they long to be recognized by us and that they are willing to work with us.

Our gardens are doing extremely well and I think that all the gratitude and love that I and our partners show to the plants and animals helps everything to flourish.

February 16th through the 22nd of next year I will be giving a workshop on working with the Nature Spirits and Biodynamic Farming here in Ecuador. We will have a great mix of presentations, exercises to connect with the nature spirits, gardening and free time for your own inner work.